Pamela L. Caughie

Bio: Pamela L. Caughie is an academic researcher from Loyola University Chicago. The author has contributed to research in topics: Identity (social science) & Postmodernism. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 28 publications receiving 244 citations.

Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Abstract: Part I Intellectuals in the Marketplace: Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin 1. Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin Selling Out(siders) Leslie Kathleen Hankins 2. Three Guineas, the In-corporated Intellectual, and Nostalgia for the Human Sonita Sarker Part II Virgina Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 3. Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality Melba Cuddy-Keane 4. The Subversive Mechanics of Woolf's Gramaphone in Between the Acts Bonnie Kime Scott 5. Why Isn't Between the Acts a Movie? Michael Tratner 6. From Edwin Hubble's Telescope to Virginia Woolf's 'Searchlight' Holly Henry 7. Virginia Woolf and the Age of Motor Cars Makiko Minow-Pinkney Part III Virginia Woolf on Both Sides of the Camera 8. Virginia Woolf, Intellectual Harlotry and 1920's British Vogue Jane Garrity 9. Virginia Woolf's Photography and the Monk's House Albums Maggie Humm Part IV Virginia Woolf in the Age of Electronic Reproduction 10. How Should One Read a Screen Mark Hussey

Passing and Pedagogy: THE DYNAMICS OF RESPONSIBILITY

Abstract: The current academic milieu displays a deep ambivalence about the teaching of Western culture and traditional subject matter. This ambivalence, the product of a unique historical convergence of theory and diversity, opens up new opportunities for what Pamela Caughie calls "passing": recognizing and accounting for the subject positions involved in representing both the material being taught and oneself as a teacher. Caughie's discussion of passing illuminates a recent phenomenon in academic writing and popular culture that revolves around identities and the ways in which they are deployed, both in the arts and in lived experience. Through a wide variety of texts - novels, memoirs, film, drama, theory, museum exhibits, legal cases - she demonstrates the dynamics of passing, presenting it not as the assumption of a fraudulent identity but as the recognition that the assumption of any identity, including for the purposes of teaching, is a form of passing. Astutely addressing the relevance of passing for pedagogy, Caughie presents the possibility of a dynamic ethics responsive to the often polarizing difficulties inherent in today's culture. Challenging and thought-provoking, "Passing and Pedagogy" offers insight and inspiration for teachers and scholars as they seek to be responsible and effective in a complex, rapidly changing intellectual and cultural environment.

Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again

Abstract: HIS ESSAY attempts to intervene theoretically and pragmatically at a critical moment in our profession, when literary studies in colleges and universities across the United States is increasingly becoming culture studies.' This transformation over the past two decades in the social, philosophical, and political bases of the humanities is due partly to the academy's efforts to acknowledge diversity, by institutionalizing multiculturalism and various "studies programs" (women's studies, gay studies, ethnic studies, composition studies) in response to the influx of nontraditional students since the early 1970s, and partly to poststructuralism's efforts to theorize difference and to destabilize the very categories of identity on which those studies programs are founded. Such programs, particularly women's studies, have traditionally been devoted to a humanist concept of the subject as "source and agent of conscious action or meaning" (P. Smith xxxiii-xxxiv) and committed to opening this subject position to previously marginalized groups. In contrast, poststructuralist theories, including some feminist theories, have revealed the humanist subject to be a sham insofar as it is the effect, not the origin, of representation. As this essay suggests, when antifoundational theories that deconstruct the self converge with studies programs that revive it, anxiety arises over the positions we find ourselves in as scholars and teachers in the newly configured university.2 Culture studies would seem to offer a pedagogy for working through the tensions between these two perspectives on the subject since issues of identity formation and of subject position are central not only to its object of study but to its method of inquiry. Culture studies has shifted

Passing as Modernism

Abstract: In 1990 Barbara Johnson gave a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on psychoanalysis and African American literature. In those days many feminists were exploring the question of whether or how post-structuralist theories could be applied to multicultural literatures. At the time I was an untenured assistant professor heavily influenced by Johnson’s style of deconstruction, so you can imagine my discomfort when I learned that the second lecture in that series, entitled “No Passing,” was to be a reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing, the very novel I was then writing about in an essay that would turn out to be the inception of Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (1999). So at the reception following the first lecture, I cornered Johnson and anxiously spewed out all the ideas I was exploring in that essay, seeking to convince her (and possibly myself) that I hadn’t taken my ideas from the lecture that I hadn’t yet heard. I talked about the nature of our authority, as white feminist critics trained in a Eurocentric theoretical and literary tradition, in the African American literature classroom where, as Patricia Hill Collins and Diana Fuss remind us, knowledge derived from experience is given more credibility than knowledge acquired through training. How does racial difference inflect the process of transference that you have helped us to see as central to the pedagogical relation, I asked her? What does it mean to learn from the one presumed not to know, from (so to speak) an unreliable narrator? In response to these questions that I found so urgent and complicated, Johnson replied with her characteristic composure: All I know is, she said, I don’t want to be another Carl Van Vechten.1 Johnson’s response came back to me several years later when I was researching and teaching at the Newberry Library in

The New York Review of Books

Abstract: It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

Abstract: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to \"put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature\". Author of \"Beloved\", \"The Bluest Eye\", \"Song of Solomon\", and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her argument is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.